# 14.3. KDE is Not Stable

KDE is being developed in two forks, one for bleeding edge development, the other for normal use (where stability is considered to be important.) One can, in general, obtain KDE in many ways. Obtaining pre-compiled binaries in a package format (rpm,deb,tgz) labelled with a particular version (ie. 1.1) is the best way to encourage stability on your KDE desktop.

The price of stability is that one must wait for each release to get new features. If you want the latest and greatest versions of software, you may have to go with source code, perhaps even to the point of CVS snapshots. These are daily snapshots of whatever the developers are working on, and some things are guaranteed to be broken. DO NOT RELY ON CVS SNAPSHOTS TO MAINTAIN OPERATIONAL DESKTOPS. You will get burned eventually!